Case Number 18068

THE HURT LOCKER

The Charge

"The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a
drug." -- Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Opening Statement

I didn't think a 21st century war film absent self-righteous moral hectoring
or a presentation of the US military as a good ol' boys club whose membership is
restricted to inbred homicidal miscreants and developmentally disabled
8-year-olds stuck in the bodies of men was possible. And then The Hurt
Locker came along and made my year.

Facts of the Case

In the early days of the Iraq war, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy
Renner, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)
rotates into the conflict as leader of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. His
job is to disarm improvised explosive devices (IEDs) while his two teammates,
Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie, She Hate Me) and Specialist Owen
Eldridge (Brian Geraghty, Bobby) provide cover on the dangerous streets
of Baghdad. James proves himself a highly skilled technician, but his
unorthodox, risk-taking ways damage the trust of his two teammates who just want
to do their jobs and survive the conflict. During their adventures, the three
men disarm an explosive at the United Nations building in Baghdad, team with a
group of British mercenaries to take out some snipers, deal with the body of a
dead boy booby-trapped with explosives, and try to save the life of an Iraqi man
locked inside a suicide bomber vest. All the while, James hurtles toward the
realization that his almost obsessive enjoyment of danger may be beneficial to
the US military, but it isn't exactly normal.

The Evidence

The Hurt Locker is my favorite film of 2009. If it doesn't at least
score a Best Director Oscar for Kathryn Bigelow, then Martin Sheen and Tim
Robbins better get their grrrrr> on because I'm going to go all Team
America on Hollywood. It'd be a shame if Bigelow didn't win this year
because she's a director who, until The Hurt Locker, has always been
better than her material. Much as I enjoy Near Dark, Point Break,
and even Strange Days, they're not great movies -- fun, well-made, but
not great. With The Hurt Locker, Bigelow finally meets material that is
worthy of her skills, and the result is unmitigated greatness. It is the Kathryn
Bigelow flick I've waited decades for. She deserves every accolade for it that
she receives.

As a director, Bigelow is a throwback in the best possible sense. She makes
independent pictures that are entirely unconcerned with irascibly quirky
characters that listen to jangly pop music, take cross-country trips in
minivans, or call each other homeskillet; she knows how to shoot the hell out of
a picture while working within the limitations imposed by non-Hollywood budgets
and schedules; and she makes genre pieces that aren't concerned with pandering
to the Jonas Brothers demographic and their hefty allowances. The Hurt
Locker is an unbridled action flick for adults. By that, I mean in part that
it lacks the gaping plot holes, wooden characters, and ridiculous dialogue that
have come to define the genre over the past couple decades. But it's even more
than that: In modern Hollywood, the phrase "for adults" usually means
that a movie is riddled with dick jokes, full frontal nudity, gratuitous
violence, or f-bombs. The Hurt Locker is an adult movie in the
traditional sense. It deals with a complex sociological reality and emotional
landscape that will be of little interest to most middle schoolers -- and it
does so without sacrificing any of the kinetic trappings of its genre.

Bigelow brilliantly stages the movie's action sequences, building suspense
like Hitchcock and paying it off with gut-punching explosions that make the
DayGlo fireballs in the movies of Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich seem as garish
and phony as they are (a near real-time firefight in the desert is particularly
impressive with long, tense pauses punctuated by short bursts of violence and
death). Some have called The Hurt Locker apolitical. That's nonsense. All
war films -- even the silly ones -- are necessarily political. The Hurt
Locker is neither silly nor moralizing. Like all great war films, it is
blunt and honest and morally complex. It only appears apolitical because Bigelow
is too concerned with treating her characters like real human beings to force
her movie to conform to the reductive self-affirming fantasies of either the
hard political left or right. The action has a rich and forceful moral backbone
so viscerally potent that it doesn't require explanation or pontification. As
SSgt. William James, decked out in a bulky Kevlar bombsuit, makes his way slowly
towards an IED that he must disarm, the movie places us squarely in the shoes of
his two teammates who scan the streets of Baghdad, looking for trouble. When
they see a man holding a cell phone or filming them with a video camera, we feel
the weight of how soldiers have to make split-second, potentially life-or-death
decisions. Is the guy with the cell phone going to detonate the IED? Do you
shoot him? What if he's just an innocent bystander, calling his wife to let her
know he'll be a little late getting home to her and the kids? This is the
emotional and psychological grinder in which The Hurt Locker's characters
live, minute by minute, day by day. Bigelow's precise direction places their
stress squarely on viewers' shoulders. This is action with moral force,
psychological heft, and honest to goodness dramatic weight. The movie is so
precisely structured that the set pieces aren't an addendum to the story, they
are the story. The Hurt Locker represents a nearly perfect merging
of style and substance.

Holding the show together is Jeremy Renner's exemplary performance as SSgt.
William James. As written in Mark Boal's (In the Valley of Elah)
screenplay, James is the loose cannon action hero cliché made flesh. Had
the movie been made 15 or 20 years ago by a lesser director, he might have been
played by Tom Cruise, sporting a crooked smile and cocky glint in eyes mostly
hidden behind Ray-Ban sunglasses. Renner's version of the action archetype is
believably three-dimensional, perhaps because he's based on a real phenomenon:
After being embedded with an EOD unit in Iraq, Boal was left dumbfounded by how
many of the soldiers, once their tours of duty were over and they were safely at
home with their wives and children, missed the adrenaline thrill and sense of
purpose that attended the high risk challenge of disarming explosives. Renner
plays James with a just-beneath-the-surface vulnerability that suggests at least
a partial awareness that his hunger for danger is abnormal and not entirely
healthy. Boal wrote the character so that we are at turns exasperated with his
selfishness and moved by his selflessness. Renner plays that very human
contradiction for all that it is worth.

Bigelow and her crew shot The Hurt Locker in Jordan on Super 16mm
stock. The Middle Eastern setting and handheld camera work adds to the sense of
authenticity that permeates the flick. Despite the small format film, Bigelow
and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (United 93) deliver an attractive
picture with a tight grain structure and attractive, natural colors. While I'm
sure it pales in comparison to the Blu-ray release, Summit Entertainment's DVD
presentation of The Hurt Locker is a solid piece of work, delivering the
movie just as Bigelow intended. The 1.78:1 anamorphic image is a slight cropping
of Super 16's native 1.66:1 aspect ratio but is in keeping with the movie's
presentation in theaters.

Dialogue, music, and effects come across well on the disc's Dolby 5.1 audio
mix. The rear soundstage is used aggressively when the situation calls for it,
and your subwoofer will definitely be called into action during the film's many
controlled and uncontrolled explosions.

The disc's extras are thin, but mostly substantive. Bigelow and Boal provide
a low-key but quite informative audio commentary. The Hurt Locker:
Behind the Scenes (12:32) is a better than average electronic press kit.
There's also an image gallery that plays as a 23-minute slideshow featurette and
includes an optional audio track consisting of a Q & A with Bigelow and Boal
from a screening of the movie at London's Institute of Contemporary Art. The Q
& A is mostly a rehash of information covered in the commentary, but is
still worth a listen.

Closing Statement

If every action movie was as smart, exciting, dramatically sure-footed, and
thematically rich as The Hurt Locker, I'd be a very happy man.